Book Review: ‘Closing the Drift’ by Tom Bray

Title: Closing the Drift

Author: Tom Bray

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: 2022

WARNING: Closing the Drift contains several topics that are unsuitable for younger readers and that adults may find distressing. Closing the Drift deals with issues of death, the death of children, child abuse and sexual abuse.

Closing the Drift is the second book in Tom Bray’s drama/psychological thriller series The Drift. Following the lives (and in some cases deaths) of Danny, Ali, Kitty, and Kerri; Closing the Drift is set two years after the events of the first novel: Merging the Drift.

The Drift (as far as we know) is an afterlife-of-sorts for people who died before they reached eighteen. In the Drift they can view an idealised version of what their lives could have been. Ali and Kerri are residents of the Drift with Kerri as one of the few people who can crossover and communicate with the real world where Danny and Kitty live.

Closing the Drift explores what happens when a new powerful player arrives, hell bent on causing chaos for the four protagonists. As their lives spiral out of control and the doorways between the two worlds start to close, terrible secrets are revealed and previously unknown family connections come crashing into the foreground.

Despite it being a while since I last read Merging the Drift I found it quite easy to follow the opening chapters of Closing the Drift and get reacquainted with the main characters. Whereas the first book devoted more time to Danny and Ali’s stories, Closing switches it around and places the shared history between Kitty and Kerri as the primary focus of the novel. Kerri was previously the character we knew the least about so I enjoyed the many chapters and insights into her dark history.

Once again it is clear that Bray’s true enjoyment lies in both world building and in creating links between his characters’ pasts. In addition to the big reveals that lead to the book’s conclusion there were also several smaller links dotted throughout the story involving secondary characters. There were a lot of names to try and keep track of so, when I realised a character had a greater significance that I initially realised, I went back and re-read the first chapter they appeared in. This helped me to better piece together the journey the story was taking and gave me a greater appreciation for Bray’s plot-crafting skills.

Something I didn’t get a chance to mention in my first review is the series’ real-world setting. For the non-Drift chapters Bray places his story in the northeast of England and there were a couple of very small references that infers the story takes place in the Newcastle-area. Despite this Bray deliberately doesn’t include any street names or local landmarks in his books. This allows readers to imagine the events of the story happening in their local city.

However, as a northeast local myself, I wasn’t sure about how our dialect was portrayed in the novel. Some characters (like the protagonists) use regular speech but others (like most of the secondary characters) are given heavy Geordie-esque dialects. While I’m sure it won’t bother most readers, for me this lack of variation or layers to the dialect felt quite noticeable.

Possibly because I was so wrapped up in trying to work out the character connections, while I registered the dialect in Merging I don’t recall it bothering me as much as it did in Closing. One example is the inclusion of the word ‘ye’ instead of the word ‘you’. In the northeast ‘you’ is sometimes phonetically pronounced as ‘y-ugh’. However by starting so many dialogue moments with ‘ye’ I felt it had the unintended consequence of making some of dialogue sound quite formal rather than natural.

I understand that incorporating accents and dialect into dialogue can be challenging so perhaps I am being too hard on Bray. It certainly doesn’t spoil the story in any way or take away from the impressive complexity of the backstories and plot. I’d be interested to know what non-northeast readers thought of the dialogue.

For fans of the first novel, Closing the Drift brings back everything readers have come to expect of this series: the characters, the relationships, the mysteries, the dark foray into the human psyche, and the occasional disturbing backstory moment. The novel is a solid second outing with a genuinely threating villain that places the protagonists in real peril. With hints at what we can expect in book three I’m looking forward to this series’ final instalment.

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